On July 8th 1524, Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano returned to France after having roughly surveyed the entire east coast of North America from Florida to Newfoundland.  A few months earlier, he had entered New York Harbor – the first European to do so.

Thanks to the late Italian American activist John LaCorte of Brooklyn, that arrival was memorialized in 1964 with a bridge across the harbor named for Verrazzano – not John F. Kennedy, as originally intended. But the Italian explorer’s legacy is greater than landing on Manhattan Island.  The nation of France and French-Canadians owe him a debt.